TEL AVIV – Israel is concerned that elements of the so-called Global
March to Jerusalem slated for Friday will attempt to storm the Jewish
state’s borders to provoke a confrontation amid reports Iranian-
backed jihad groups are involved in planning the event.

U.S. endorsers of the Global March include President Obama’s
controversial former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.; Cornel West, a
longtime friend of Obama who served as an adviser to the president’s
2008 campaign; and Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group
Code Pink.

Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, a close associate of Obama
for years, helped originate the concept of creating border chaos for
Israel in 2009.

According to reports, Iran is also heavily involved in organizing the
march.

The activists plan to march to several of Israel’s borders Friday
to “demand freedom for Jerusalem and its people and to put an end to
the Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaisation policies affecting
the people, land and sanctity of Jerusalem.”

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists that are part of dozens of
international delegations began arriving in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan
yesterday.

The Lebanese portion of the march is reportedly being fully
coordinated with Lebanese security forces, some branches of which are
known to include Hezbollah supporters.

While protest organizers stressed the event will remain peaceful,
Israel is concerned about an element of the march that may be
coordinating with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, according to defense
officials here.

Yesterday, citing Global March sources, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
reported some activists fear the event could get out of control due
to the involvement of outside forces.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, or ITIC,
at Israel’s Center for Special Studies presented evidence that Iran
and Palestinian terrorists have been involved in planning the march.

The ITIC reported a local committee was appointed in Iran to make
preparations for the marches, called The Board of the Global [March]
to Jerusalem in Iran. It names two Iranian planners who are “handled
and directed by the Iranian regime.”

In Lebanon, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad are involved in organizing the march, ITIC found. Sheikh Abd al-
Majid Omar, the Hezbollah representative, and Abu Imad al-Rifa’i,
from the PIJ, participated in the march planning meeting which took
place on February 21, 2012 in Hamas headquarters in a southern suburb
of Beirut.

U.S. radicals originate Israel border chaos

The concept of provoking border chaos bears the handiwork of U.S.
radical activists.

Beginning in 2010, international activists attempted to use flotillas
to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

In May 2010, a flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the
Hamas-affiliated Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and
Humanitarian Relief was raided by Israel, resulting in deadly clashes
in which nine activists were killed.

Activist leaders in the Free Gaza Movement include Ayers and his
wife, former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn.

Ayers, Dohrn and Code Pink activists led several Free Gaza Movement
initiatives, including attempted marches into the Gaza Strip.

The activists were behind provoking chaos on the streets of Egypt in
December 2009 and January 2010 in an attempt to enter the Hamas-
controlled Gaza Strip to join in solidarity with the territory’s
population and leadership.

That protest marked the first attempt to reach Gaza or assault
Israel’s borders.

The Gaza saga began when the radicals arrived in Egypt Dec. 31, 2009.
Code Pink’s Jodie Evans appealed to Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of
Egypt’s president at the time, to allow some 1,400 activists to cross
from Egypt into neighboring Gaza to march there, deliver humanitarian
aid and stage a protest at an Israeli border crossing with thousands
of Palestinian Gazans. Egypt’s Interior Ministry had said the march
was illegal and a threat to national security.

Mubarak reportedly offered to allow only 100 activists to cross into
Gaza. The decision was at first reportedly accepted by Evans but was
later rejected, leading to protests throughout Cairo all week under a
heavy police presence.

The rioters claimed some of the protests were violent.

A press release by organizers claimed: “Members of the Gaza Freedom
March are being forcibly detained in hotels around town as well as
violently forced into pens in Tahrir Square by Egyptian police and
additional security forces. Reports of police brutality are flooding
a delegate legal hotline faster than the legal support team can
answer the calls. The reports span from women being kicked, beaten to
the ground and dragged into pens, at least one confirmed account of
broken ribs, and many left bloody.”

The website BigGovernment.com noted author Philip Weiss wrote of
witnessing Ayers’ and Dohrn’s involvement in the debate about whether
to accept Egypt’s offer of allowing only a limited number of
protesters to enter Gaza.

“As for the Egyptian statement that only hooligans were staying
behind in Cairo … Dohrn said that the principle of ‘all or none’ was
a miserable one for activist politics. … A European man in a red
keffiyeh screamed at her that she was serving the fascisti. Her
partner Bill Ayers gently confronted him and asked him why he was so
out of control.”

Dohrn later wrote on a blog that she was briefly detained at the U.S.
Embassy in Cairo following protests there by her group.

“Bill and I went to the American Embassy at 10 a.m. and asked to see
the Ambassador. We were ushered into a holding pen a block away from
the embassy building where we joined 35 people already there,
surrounded by Egyptian soldiers,” she wrote.

Protests also were staged in front of other foreign embassies as well
as in a public area in central Cairo.

Eventually, the protesters accepted the Egyptian offer of allowing
about 100 marchers into Gaza. The marchers indeed entered Gaza and
were reportedly met on the Gaza side by former Hamas Prime Minister
Ismail Haniyeh.

“We have managed to overcome the occupation plans and we will surely
meet at the al-Aqsa Mosque and in Jerusalem, which will remain Arab
and Islamic,” Haniyeh declared.

Evans squarely blamed Israel for Egypt’s refusal to allow her group
to cross en masse into Gaza.